Creator /
Hideo Kojima

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"When you actually play my games, I don't want people to play them just for fun, or because they have nothing else to do. I want the players to find something more, to enrich their lives through games."

— Hideo Kojima, Metal Gear Solid 4 Making of

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Kojima became a video game director because he was not able to enter the movie industry. As a teenager, he wrote multiple "short"- stories and sent them to various publications. However, none of them were ever published as his stories oftentimes exceeded 400 pages. His works feature frequent discussions about science, history, politics and culture as well as shameless references to films - primarily American action movies, of which he is a huge fan. His games often glorify, deconstruct, reference, or pastiche Hollywood tropes - from theme naming his cast after movie characters to copying action sequences motion-for-motion. Most of his stories fit into the category of Magic Realism, featuring Humongous Mechas and magical Super Soldiers within the context of real-world settings and events.

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He is also dedicated to giving his games an utterly enormous level of world detail in terms of character backstories, politics, history, culture, and science. As a direct result, his games feature so much information that it is almost impossible to find every bit on a first playthrough, starting with an absolutely gigantic in-game encyclopedia detailing the world of Snatcher, and carrying on throughout the Metal Gear series.

Kojimas games, especially in the Metal Gear series, feature a lot of characteristics uncommon in non-sandbox video games. They do not feature levels or missions, but a single location (like a military base or a large jungle) where all of the story takes place. The games prior to Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker also mostly consist of cutscenes and static dialogue, with gameplay often taking up only a minority of each game's length.

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He also constantly tries to surprise the audience. Each game of his features heavy plot twists and when he makes trailers, he oftentimes edits objects and characters out of certain footage and re-arranges scenes and dialogue to create a misleading impression. For example, all trailers for 2001's Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty famously edited Raiden (the game's Contrasting Sequel Main Character) out of every scene he appears in and replaced him with Solid Snake, to hide the now-infamous change in protagonists that occurs after the prologue chapter.

Kojima is also known for never talking about his stories in-depth. He often says that his stories are anti-war, yet his protagonists are regularly sent on military missions with noble goals, such as preventing a nuclear catastrophe. He also states that he never aims at writing a complex storyline, yet his plots involve a great deal of real life information that he painstakingly researches, and they always pose deep philosophical and cultural questions that characters may spend the entire game discussing. Kojima also states that he wants people to think about his stories for themselves, which might be the reason for him making such contradictory statements.

In Febuary 2016, Kojima started a Web Video series called HideoTube to further reach out to his fans. The content is mostly all over the place, ranging from food to events in Tokyo to movies to the video game industry from his point of view. The videos are uploaded monthly and are in Japanese but with English subtitles. However, they have since slowed down, presumably due to Death Stranding going into full production. In the latest episode (the first in almost half a year), Kojima-San mentioned that he was even considering ending the series due to his very busy schedule.

Above all else, Kojima is a world builder. He'll reel off yard after yard of flavor text describing your surroundings, politics of the day, the latest fashions and tech toys, your teammates' pasts and motivations, philosophy, and assorted Jeopardy! trivia.

Kojima-san also makes a lot David Bowie references in his scripts, i.e., Diamond Dogs, Major Tom (from Space Oddity), and "The Man Who Sold The World". There is also a character in MGS2 (Scott Dolph) who barks at his soldiers to "turn to the right!", which is in the David Bowie song, "Fashion".﻿

Kojima is a major Hollywood buff, frequently going out of his way to see foreign films before they release in his home country and gushing about his favorites on twitter. The marketing for the Japanese releases of Deadpool and La La Land made good use of this by mentioning how much he loved them.

Contemplate Our Navels: There are often long conversations about things like Neo Kobe Pizza, movies, etc. Especially drawn out in his web videos, which is a full hour of this trope.

Creator Breakdown: Kinda. While it obviously hasn't affected his work on Death Stranding, it's pretty obvious from how he gently talked about it that Konami's treatment on him really affected him.

Doing It for the Art: He originally planned to pursue a career in filmmaking before deciding to switch to game design. This was met with demands for reconsideration by his peers and family, as video games were a largely infantile industry at the time. Who's Laughing Now?

Fanservice: As far back as Policenauts, his games have featured notable amounts of this. The aforementioned title featured Easter eggs where you could grope the breasts of female characters without consequence, and the Metal Gear series tends to feature at least one scantily-clad Femme Fatale per game. Happily, there's often a fair amount of male fanservice too.

Meaningful Name: For example, Raiden's civilian name "Jack" is a reference to a lot of things. Including an American nickname for a Japanese warplane from World War II.

Mind Screw: One of his trademarks. A big part of the reason why people were excited for Silent Hills: based on the tech demo, it seemed he was preparing to take the recently kind-of-lackluster series in refreshingly bizarre new directions.

Motive Rant: Oftentimes far longer than the time it takes to actually defeat the villain.

Never Trust a Trailer: He hates it when trailers spoil the story, so he deliberately makes totally misleading trailers. He took this to its absolute limit with Metal Gear Solid 2, where the fact that Snake isn't even the main character was completely, totally obscured.

Older Than They Look: Look at him again. No way the guy looks in his 50s. This is joked by fans that he had nanomachines implanted in him.

Revival by Commercialization: Existing songs that are featured in his games or game trailers have been known to become wildly popular. To wit, Midge Ure's cover of David Bowie's "The Man Who Sold the World" and Low Roar's "I'll Keep Coming", the former somewhat known but not popular, and the latter barely known, experienced exponential spikes in popularity after they were used in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain and Death Stranding, respectively. Mike Oldfield's "Nuclear" is also most widely associated with Metal Gear Solid V after being used in a trailer.

Some films that have inspired his work:

Children of Mennote You can see the influences very strongly in MGSV's cutscenes, who liberally use Jitter CamLong Takes with reactive camera movements to give a sense of presence and lingering camera shots to show the important details

Super Smash Bros.: He wanted Solid Snake in to be included in Melee and got his wish granted in Brawl.

Pacific Rim, which he was very happy about◊ and may have led to his later collaboration with Guillermo del Toro in Silent Hills until it was sadly cancellednote Which was somewhat rectified in Death Stranding, which Del Toro had willingly lent his likeness to a character in the game even if it's not played by himself proper.

Gundam, with the reference to Minovsky Particles in Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and his photos of himself with the Odaiba statue being just the tip of the iceberg.

David Bowie: Several references have been made to both his albums and songs throughout the Metal Gear series, and Midge Ure's cover of "The Man Who Sold the World" was used as the main theme song of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Godzilla. On your first save in Snake Eater, the first movie Para-Medic tells Big Boss is the very first Godzilla (1954) film. He even posted the posters he bought of Shin Godzilla.

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